


a thousand miles from home

by nadin



Category: Snowpiercer (TV 2020)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25911415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nadin/pseuds/nadin
Summary: She got used to wearing masks and feeling like her face might crack underneath them, the never-ending cycle of lies she couldn’t break chipping away from her soul bit by bit.Melanie Cavill often wondered if losing herself to save everyone else was a worthy sacrifice.Melanie Cavill built Snowpiercer and then took it away from the person who would have destroyed it. But she could never quite imagine what living with that decision would be like, until it was too late.
Relationships: Melanie Cavill/Bennett Knox
Comments: 14
Kudos: 33





	a thousand miles from home

**Author's Note:**

> I think I could probably spend the next year writing a dissertation on Melanie's character and it still wouldn't uncover every layer. She is so complex and amazing and fascinating, and nothing like what most people think. Except Bennett, perhaps? I keep thinking about that scene where Josie asked her "What made you this way?" and there is no one answer, I suppose. 
> 
> Anyway, this is quite ansgty, be warned. 
> 
> (No beta, all typos are mine)

“We can’t keep them, Mel,” Javi pressed, his tone urgent. “There are not enough supplies for 400 more people, not enough rations, and the crops will take time to grow.”

Melanie ran her hands down her face, her head throbbing.

“I know, Javi,” she muttered.

“And the Tail was never meant for living,” Bennett added, his voice laced with the practicality that she wished she felt. “There’s no heating there, it’s  _ storage.  _ We can’t provide for them. _ ” _

“I know,” she repeated as she pinched the bridge of her nose, willing the mother of all headaches away.

“Then what’s your hesitation about?” Javi inquired.

Even with her eyes closed, she could feel his gaze on her, expectant. There had been a lot of those lately, in the week and a half since they had boarded Snowpiercer, the people still trying to find the semblance of a new balance, turning to her when they had no one else to turn to.

So often, Melanie had no answers for them.

She lowered her hands slowly, her gaze not focused on either of the men, trained instead on the endless stretch of white behind the windshield of the Engine.

“Because I’m not  _ him.” _

Because Wilford would have uncoupled the Tail instantly, sending 400 souls to their death, and a brutal one, at that. Because he would not have hesitated, not for a moment, and she had promised to herself that she would try to do things differently, as much as she could. Because to him, those people would be nothing but ballast. Not life. Not a workforce. Not survivors. And she’d be damned if she allowed herself to be like him.

This was not her world. If Melanie had her say, she would have created a different society, applied a different approach. Make it just and fair, as just and fair as the world could be, in the middle of a new Ice Age. But she had not. All she had now was 3000 people who depended on her and relied on her ability to figure out how to keep them alive until they rode out the Freeze.

She knew that the unticketed passengers would cause some turmoil, but she hadn’t expected the wave of hostility their presence would invoke. Something that bordered on war, as much as one was even possible on Snowpiercer. Demands to cut them loose because they didn’t deserve to be here. Disgust from First because their carefully created illusion had shattered and fear from Third who felt like their jobs and rations were threatened. And one person to placate them all and keep the peace—Melanie Cavill.

She had never understood the notion of being baptized by fire until she had to learn ten years’ worth of politics in three days so she could put out fires before they had a chance to burn down them all.

Countless speeches, carefully put together to reinstate people’s cracked faith in Wilford’s ability to keep them happy. Hours upon hours upon hours of adjustments and recalculation to ensure everyone had enough of everything, even when  _ everything _ was a laughable idea for those who were stuck in the Tail. And the fear, so much fear that she was going to fail and they would all die, leaving nothing but ten miles of a metal tube behind before they even had a chance at surviving the frozen hell.

It was up to her to make everyone happy now. Something that she knew Wilford would never even attempt, had he lived long enough to board Snowpiercer.

And she had no idea how she was supposed to do it.

She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in her quarters one day, scribbling formulas on the white walls because it helped her see them better in the absence of a proper whiteboard—better than when they were on paper or on a screen. They had been maintaining good speed but Melanie knew it wouldn’t last, and she was trying to figure out how to keep their battery banks full and have enough resources to go around.

Bennett walked in without knocking—had she forgotten to close the door? she couldn’t remember—and plopped down on the floor next to her. Wordlessly, he offered her half of his sandwich, and just as wordlessly, she took it, only realizing how ravenous she was after she took the first bite. They ate in silence while his eyes followed the formulas, a slight frown creasing the skin between his brows.

“We’ll have to take some from Third, for the time being,” she explained around the mouthful of her sandwich. “Can’t ration the Ag-Sec until the first crops come up. Afterwards, we’ll have to recalculate.”

Bennett nodded.

“May I?” he asked, jerking his chin towards her marker. She handed it over and he made a couple of corrections, adding a string of other calculations underneath hers. “We’ll build the reserve soon enough, we can afford to spare some of it.”

Until something broke, she thought. Until they were stretched out thin, which she knew would come. But for now, he was right.

Melanie took the marker from him, corrected his formula until she was satisfied, feeling the cold hand of worry unclench from around her lungs and she finally allowed herself to exhale. She tossed the final bit of her sandwich into her mouth, allowing herself to double- and triple-check everything again while she chewed.

“This might work,” she admitted as she turned to Bennett.

He grinned, the corners of his eyes crinkling and making her heart slam hard against the inside of her ribs. He lifted his hand and ran his thumb over the corner of her mouth, brushing off the crumbs as the moment lingered between them.

And when he breathed a quiet, “Yeah,” Melanie wasn’t quite sure if they were still talking about resources and rations, or something else entirely.

* * *

They hated her, and half the time she couldn’t blame them for it. Half the time, she hated herself even more. They called her a sociopath and a fascist and Wilford’s whore—the irony of how wrong they were on the latter was never lost on Melanie.

She never responded, keeping her chin up, growing a thicker skin that she could wear like armour. Something that sometimes made it hard for her to remember herself before the Freeze. Something that made her wonder if  _ before _ had ever existed. Without it, though, she knew she would have shattered a long time ago, and this carefully curated society of the last survivors would have descended into chaos.

She got used to wearing masks and feeling like her face might crack underneath them, the never-ending cycle of lies she couldn’t break chipping away from her soul bit by bit.

Melanie Cavill often wondered if losing herself to save everyone else was a worthy sacrifice.

Her hand curled over the fistful of Bennett’s jumpsuit as she yanked him towards her, his mouth hot on her and his hands threading through her hair, sliding down along her back with a moment of hesitation. It was only with him that she felt alive, still herself, the ice crust around her heart melting beneath his touch.

No need to pretend, no need to be someone she was not.

He never undermined her authority—and that was something that surprised her, at first, after the years of Wilford doing that just for the hell of it. He never hesitated to tell her that she was wrong but he wasn’t afraid to apologize either, and Melanie respected him for it. He didn’t need to tell her that he was on her side—she knew it when she needed to. 

Melanie trusted him, and on Snowpiercer, trust went a long way.

She trusted him to keep the human part of her alive.

“There are things I can’t do differently because people will rise against the truth and it will be the end of everything,” she told him one night, lulled by the steady hum of the train, her voice a little drowsy even though she tried to hang on to a thin thread of wakefulness.

A confession that surprised her, perhaps, as much as it surprised him.

Bennett stayed quiet for a long moment as his fingers continued to sift through her hair, and she wondered if he was going to argue. But in the end, he only murmured, “I know.”

* * *

It took the Tail two revolutions to rebel, and while Melanie saw it coming from day one, it still caught her off-guard when it happened.

She had been caught up in First when it broke out, and by the time she made it to the Tail, the fight was over before it even had a chance to truly start. But that was not to say it hadn’t wreaked some havoc, all the same. Five people were dead, four Tailies and one Jackboot whose neck had been cut with a sharpened piece of a broken pipe. Thirteen more were injured.

But it was the blood that had Melanie coming to a halt when she stepped into the car where it had happened, sprays of it on the wall, thick pools beneath her feet. And the smell of it—she would spend weeks washing it out of her clothes, off her hair, and each day, she would still continue carrying it on her skin like a film she couldn’t scrub off.

There had to be a punishment for that. There were protocols in place, designed to keep the peace, to keep the order in any way possible. It was her job to assign retribution that would serve as a lesson to discourage those who might think of revolting again.

If  _ Mr. Wilford _ remained silent, someone might suspect something, she knew, and then it wouldn’t be five people dead. It could be most of them, desperate to destroy one another in a fight for power.

“These are the rules, Melanie,” Ruth said to her with the pragmatism that offered little room for argument after Melanie announced the assigned punishment—an arm to be taken from one of the Tailies.

When she had taken the train, she had vowed to keep Wilford’s order and enforce his authority for the sake of the illusion. She had also promised to herself to bend the rules where she could—to make up for the unspeakable things that she had no control over. But there was no walking away from this. From the violence that ran in everything embedded with a W.

She went to the Tail herself, that first time, with half a dozen of Jackboots to keep order, to keep her safe. She was the one to read the verdict to the people who relied on her for everything in their lives, feeling oddly detached by the time she fell silent, numb to the point when she had to wonder if there was coming back from it. The eyes on her were full of fear and resentment—she represented everything these people despised about their lives, and she couldn’t fault them for it.

When the frozen arm shattered on the metal floor under the precise hit of a hammer, Melanie Cavill felt something inside of her snap in half. Another piece of her dying for something that should never have been hers, in the first place.

And the silence. The awful silence that settled over the space already filled with despair.

She was still hearing it when she stumbled into her quarters, falling on her knees in front of her toilet before she threw up twice, her throat burning with bile.

“Mel?”

Through the ringing in her ears, she heard Bennett call her name on the other side of the door. (She tried to remember if she’d passed by him on her way here, if he had tried speaking with her, but her mind was blank.)

“Mel, you alright?” he tried again.

She ignored him as her stomach continued to heave, her chest clenching and unclenching as she tried to inhale. So, this was what power tasted like, she thought bitterly. This was what she would have to learn to live with for as long as she breathed.

Once her stomach settled, somewhat, Melanie pulled herself up to her feet. From the mirror over the sink, a stranger stared back at her, hollow-eyed and pale and broken. Someone she didn’t think she would recognize again. She rinsed her mouth over and over again, scrubbing a washcloth over her face afterwards before she sank down to the floor once more, leaning against the door.

Moments later, she heard a soft thud as Bennett slumped against it on the other side.

She pressed her hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes, hot tears burning her cheeks and squeezing all air out of her lungs. He didn’t try speaking to her again while she cried.

“You think I’m a monster?” she asked after her tears had stopped, leaving her feeling so hollowed out she could barely stand it.

“I think you wouldn’t get sick over it if you were,” he said, quietly.

But he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen that man’s arm break like it was made of glass.

Melanie shifted, reaching for the lock, and he scooted away when she pushed the door open, his gaze sweeping over her features with the worry that brought the hot lump back in her throat and made her eyes sting again.

She kicked off her heels, only now realizing she was still wearing them, and moved towards him. Immediately, he lifted his arm, and Melanie ducked underneath it, pressing her face into his shoulder. She didn’t deserve his kindness, but knowing that only made her crave it more.

They sat against the wall filed with her scribbles from almost a year ago, somewhat faded now, until her breathing evened out, his hand running soothingly up and down her arm. He didn’t ask any questions, but he probably didn’t need to. 

“Will you stay?” she asked softly as the light started to dim outside, the shadows encroaching on them. One of them needed to get up and turn on the lights but she couldn’t bring herself to move, part of her still floored by the savage glee in First after she had announced the fate of that man who, she knew, likely wouldn’t survive the loss of his arm. “We don’t have to...” she trailed off. 

Bennett tightened his hold on her. She felt his slight chuckle rather than heard it as he turned to press a kiss to the top of her head. “Yeah, I’ll stay,” he whispered into her hair. “If that’s what you want.”

She sent Ruth downtrain whenever they needed to deal with the Tailies after that. 

**Author's Note:**

> What do you guys think we'll get in Season? Any theories? Speculations?


End file.
